I don’t know why so many of you hate corporations and the fact that they are treated as a legal entity. 

There’s a lot of misinformation about corporations that I always see tossed around on here. 

A lot of people believe that corporations are people. A lot of others believe that corporations should never be treated as an entity.  Some believe that the existence of corporations is evil. Others believe it to be a pure function of the state. 

Corporations would exist with or without states because, for the most part, people are lazy and it’s easier to allude to a large group as a single group than it is to name each member specifically. It’s also a function of contracts and organization, both of which would exist without a state so long as people were willing to engage in such activities. 

It’s also easier to pool needed capital as a collection of individuals than as an individual endeavor. Again, it’s much easier for contractual or organizational purposes, as either a 3rd party or as a contributor to the collective, to refer to the organization as a single entity than to refer to each contributor individually. Just like how we call a book by it’s title and not by the name of each chapter or by each word on each page. 

Just because corporations find their legal definitions to be written by and supported by a state does not make it a function or entity which can only exist through the state. Voting can be defined in the same manner but sovereign individuals can and do vote on all sorts of things, from where to eat lunch to who the next American Idol is all without the intervention or support of the state. Likewise, if the state disappeared tomorrow, individuals would still find it beneficial to organize as a corporation for various reasons. 

Saying corporations would disappear without the state is no different than saying roads would disappear, and we all know how much libertarians and anti-statists hate that fallacy. 

I can get with this. 

(via anarcho-queer)